The campaigning continues...
ISTANBUL
— Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly
disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq
had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that
tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate
conditions.
On Wednesday,
the United States military said
that a small team of 18 Marines and Special Operations soldiers had
completed an assessment of conditions on Mount Sinjar and found that
most of the Yazidis, a small Iraqi religious minority, had succeeded in
escaping, and the numbers remaining were in the low thousands.
American
officials said that the assessment meant American airstrikes and
humanitarian airdrops, along with efforts by Kurdish pesh merga
militiamen, were working and “an evacuation mission is far less likely,”
in the words of Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby on Wednesday.
Speaking from her hospital bed here, Vian Dakhil, an Iraqi member of Parliament and a Yazidi leader who was injured in the crash of a helicopter delivering aid to the mountain on Tuesday ... estimated the number of Yazidis trapped on the southern flanks of Mount Sinjar at 70,000 to 80,000.
Ms.
Dakhil’s assessment of the seriousness of the Yazidis’ plight was
supported by United Nations humanitarian officials, who on Thursday were
unequivocal that there remained a major crisis among the Yazidis on
Mount Sinjar.
Curiouser and curiouser.
<< Home